Then she turned a comer and saw Allo.
She almost stopped walking—almost turned back the way she’d come—but no, they’d be looking for such a pattern of movement. And there was no telling who was behind her now, watching for it. With pounding heart she moved into the crowd heading toward him, wondering just how good her disguise was. It wouldn’t pass close inspection, she knew that, she’d just hoped it would buy her time while she lost herself in the crowd. She paused at a display of food items, tried to look hungry, and then turned away from him as if to inspect its wares. She had bet everything on the fact that they wouldn’t assume her to have managed such a complete change of look so quickly; if they did, and were looking closely at the faces that passed them, this outfit wouldn’t help her at all.
Shifting her weight from leg to leg, she leaned over slightly at the waist to peruse something on a lower shelf. Her skirt didn’t have a lot of clearance for that kind of maneuver, and she knew it. She sensed a couple of tourists stopping behind her, heard their smiling whispers. Men. They were so funny, so predictable. They could pass by a dozen nudes and not pay attention to one, but hit them with a piece of clothing that might slip out of place and their eyes became riveted. It must be some evolutionary thing, survival of the fittest and all that; maybe from the days when a woman in a fur sarong might have been hiding an extra banana or two beneath her wrap, whereas a nude offered no food at all. She giggled to herself and leaned down a little lower, enjoying the game. Too bad she couldn’t really buy food, but the water had taken up the last of her cash, and she could hardly use her debit chip now. Or her headset. Or anything, in fact, but her brain.
After some time had passed, she turned away with a sigh—not hungry after all—and glanced surreptitiously at where Allo had stood. He was gone. The knot that had been forming in her chest started to unwind, and she had to remind herself, Be careful. He may still be around here somewhere. But it was a good omen, at least. Sometimes you needed omens.
She walked. Far, far, following instructions whispered to her by Raven, confirmed by consensus of all the Others. Walked with a swinging gait that spoke of sex and leisure and wealth and said nothing of fear and flight. Men smiled at her as she passed. Some women, also, and a few creatures whose sex she wasn’t too sure of. She smiled back at all of them. A creature of pleasure am I, inhabitant of this lovely station, addicted to its many delights. Three corridors became five, became ten, and at last she began to relax. They couldn’t have followed her this far. They couldn’t get help from the authorities either, no matter what story they came up with to explain themselves, because their own business was so suspect they just couldn’t risk the contact.
At last she took a side corridor to where the flyways were anchored. It was going to be a hell of a flight in this outfit, but that couldn’t be helped; she could hardly change clothes here. She kicked her shoes off so at least she could get some traction if she needed it, then ducked into the circular portal and gave herself a good shove to start. It was a public flyway, wide enough for a dozen support lines in each direction, and travelers grinned or smirked or shook their heads at her as she went by. Well, that’s what happened when you wore G-dependent clothing in a free zone; she hoped they enjoyed the show. She rather enjoyed the shock on their faces herself, and was willing to bet that if questioned later, they, too, would not remember what her face looked like. Oh, had she worn scarlet underwear? That must have been a mistake, how could she choose anything so bright ... ?
The flyway brought her to an inner ring, from which point a free tube took her down to the station itself. Raven had all the maps of Paradise organized for this journey, and she brought them up one by one into Katlyn’s field of vision as she walked. God, but she was tired; the journey, the tension, and the pressure of the heeled shoes were bleeding all the strength from her body. She was hungry, too, and wished she could afford food. The tube let her off in a mall that was ringed with delicacies, but no cash meant no food. At least until her financial problems were dealt with.
For a moment she just stood in the middle of the mall, hardly able to absorb all that had happened to her. People rushed by on every side of her: adults, children, humans. Variants. All going somewhere, all doing something. She should have been overwhelmed by the chaos of it all, but she wasn’t. She was overwhelmed by something else.
She had made it.
Her enemies were behind her. They didn’t know where she was. If she’d played her cards right, then even the Guild didn’t know where she was ... thanks in part to Allo and his crew. God alone knew why the Guerans wanted her so badly, but for the time being she didn’t have to find out. She had lost herself in a crowd of millions, and if she was careful enough they’d never pick up her trail again.
All right, so she didn’t have food or friends, money, shelter, or any of the other hundred-and-some-odd things you needed to get along. But those could be acquired, in time. Safety couldn’t. Safety was a prerequisite to all other achievements.
And she had managed that.
Tired, hungry, she asked Raven for the map for the next phase of her journey and started walking. It was only four miles on foot to the place she needed, and that was a distance she could manage. When she got out of the shopping district, she’d change her shoes to make walking easier, and after that she should be all right. The hi-G of the station proper was hard on five-inch heels.
Safe. She was safe. The word had a strange taste in her mouth, as she whispered it aloud to make it seem more real. She was safe, and in control, and for the first time since leaving the metroliner she actually thought she might manage to get through all this somehow. It was a new feeling, and a strangely refreshing one. Hopefully, if she nurtured it right, it would endure.
With a sigh of resignation—and a faint growl of hunger in her stomach-she began to walk toward the less prosperous districts.
The propensity of young men to engage in mischief is increased many times with each new advance in technology. Those devices which seem to us a remarkable convenience are to them no more than new and delightful toys, whose disruption is merely one more way for them to test their young and rebellious spirits against the tenets of established Authority.
HAROLD E. RUTHERFORD, ESQ.
The Perils of Progress: a Warning Against the New Telephonic Machines and Other Modern Contrivances. (Historical Archives, Hellsgate Station)
PARADISE NODE PARADISE STATION
SLEEP. PHOENIX vaguely remembered it. That was something you did when you didn’t have a virus dancing inside your head, right? Something you did when there was no pressing business.
If such a time had ever existed. If it ever would again.
He was obsessed, but that was okay. There was a gene for obsession, and all the hackers had it. He could measure his own by the crumpled packages of instant food that littered the floor around his workbench. Wrappers from Energee! bars, shredded envelopes of Lo-Munch, boxes of some god-forsaken soft drink that he was currently addicted to, the straws sticking out like Veridian eye stalks. He couldn’t remember eating any of it, but that was normal for him. Food was fuel, nothing more, and at times like this he paid no more attention to it than you would pay to the compressed fuel you put into your pod.
The virus was all.
He could see why Chaos had been obsessed with it. He could even see why she had let it into her head, and Torch also. It was just that good. Sometimes he would reach out with his hand to the monitor as if he could touch the thing, wanting to run his virtual fingers across its surface, hungering to fold it and turn it and manipulate it as only the mind’s eye could do, to see what made it tick. But that was suicide, plain and simple. He’d already sent out a warning to the other stations about what this thing could do, and how they should never, ever, let their people inload it. How could he make the very same mistake he was warning them against?
But he wanted to. He wanted to so badly.
With a sigh he reached out for the nearest drink box
, cursing softly when he found it to be empty. At times like this he resented the five steps between his workbench and the chiller. He picked up another one from the shelf over his desk and forced himself to move, cramped muscles emphatic in their protest as he crossed the small room and opened the chiller door. Five seconds was all it would take to make the stuff palatable, so he set the chiller for that, put the drink box inside, and let it do its stuff. Five seconds. You could skip a message to Hellsgate in that much time. You could push the button that set off a cascade of destructive programs and watch their effect. You could feel the bite of a foreign virus in your head and know yourself doomed, you could feel the panic rising as your brain shut down, bit by bit, and have time to imagine what the end result would be....
Five seconds was a long time, in his world. He hated to waste it.
He shook the box when it came out of the chiller, to even the temperature, and then pierced it and took a deep drink. The contents were a sugar-and-stim mix, disguised with a little food coloring and a dollop of some weird synthetic flavor. The taste wasn’t a thrill, but the coldness of it chilled his tongue as it went down, and it felt good. He drank it all, then crushed the box in his hand and threw it toward the recycler. It missed. No surprise there. His attention was already on the monitor once more, and the monster that lurked behind it. Perhaps if this time he tried one of Chaos’ testing sequences ...
The pattern that was on his monitor suddenly disappeared and a square of white light took its place.
Fuck.
He stared at it for a few seconds, waiting for it to resolve itself. When you processed as much illegal shit as he did, sometimes glitches just happened. He even hit the side of the monitor once, in a strategy as old as mankind himself, to see if that would clear the problem.
No dice.
With a muttered curse he flashed his brainware an instruction to come online again, and started feeding it the control codes that would reclaim his system. Someone was screwing with his stuff, that was clear, and it had damn well better not be one of his own people. Or rather, he thought grimly, it had better be one of his own people, because if this was some stranger fucking with his system, he’d better kiss his own ’ware good-bye right now—
Numbers appeared in the center of the screen. 10 first, then 9, then 8 ... the pattern was clear. He watched the countdown with a mixture of annoyance and real frustration. Goddam whoever was pulling this shit, if he actually screwed up any of Phoenix’s work. The only thing worse than a war between hackers and the government was a sniping vendetta between hackers themselves.
Then: 0. The dot exploded into a circle of black smoke, which in turn became a rising column, which in turn became capped with a thick mushroom head that spread across his screen—
—which answered the question about who it was, anyway.
He flashed up the icons needed to send a message to him. FUCK YOU, MAN.
The mushroom cloud faded from his screen and block letters appeared instead. IS THIS A MONITOR I SEE? WHATCHA, PROGRAMMING FOR DINOSAURS NEXT?
He flashed back: JUST SENDING OUT VIRUSES TO GUYS WHO PISS ME OFF.
OOOOH, I AM SOOOO SCAAAAARED.
Despite himself, he smiled. It was hard, really hard to hate Nuke. The guy was an irritant extraordinaire, but so was half of Phoenix’s crowd. It came with the territory. Still, he really did want to get back to that virus, and he wasn’t all that comfortable with having someone else access his system while it was in there.
IS THERE A POINT TO THIS?
POINT? UH. YEAH. POINT ... A frowning face appeared on the screen. I THINK SO....
CUT THE SHIT, MAN.
OOH. BAD MOOD. NO NEW PROJECT FOR YOU, P I’LL GO FIND SOMEONE ELSE....
LIKE HELL YOU WILL. WHAT’S UP?
There was a long pause. He knew Nuke well enough to know what that signified, that the subject being discussed might really be serious. He leaned closer to the screen.
SOMETHING IN FROM DOCKING RING GREEN. RIGHT UP YOUR ALLEY
He frowned. That was one of the inner rings, dedicated to smaller ships. It handled mostly local traffic, pods from the many habitats in Paradise, smaller shipments from nearby stations ... and smaller ships that wanted to slip into Paradise unnoticed. Customs kept a close watch on Green, but not close enough; it was a known fact that half the contraband that passed through the waystation came in through the juncture. So if something was happening out there that was interesting enough for a hacker to contact Phoenix ... interesting enough for him to hack all the overrides that protected Phoenix’s current work, so that he could take over the monitor screen for com use ... that might be worth sparing a minute to hear about. Maybe even more than a minute, depending on what it was.
SO WHAT IS IT?
Numbers scrolled across his field of vision, flashes of code, commands in English. Halfway through, he realized he hadn’t put his recorder back online, and cursed the loss of all that had come before as he did so.
SLOWER, OKAY? WHAT THE HELL IS THAT CRAP ANYWAY?
DON’T RECOGNIZE IT? SHAME ON YOU. The frowning face stuck out its tongue. IT’S EARTH CODE FOR DAMN IMPORTANT SHIT, IS WHAT IT IS. IT TURNED UP ON A FINANCE CHIP.
Finance? He ran the last section of code before his eyes again, then stiffened as he saw where this was heading. WHERE DID YOU GET IT?
GIRL FROM REIJIK NODE. NEWBIE, I THINK. PAYING FIVE THOUSAND FOR ME TO DOCTOR THE CHIP FOR A CLEAN WITHDRAWAL. ODDS 50-50 RIGHT NOW FOR ME, I FIGURE. I KNOW YOU SPECIALIZE IN THIS KIND OF THING.
He considered carefully before responding. I COULD DO IT.
WOW. REALLY? HEY, MAYBE THAT’S WHY I COMMED YOU?
He ignored the sarcasm. WHERE ARE YOU NOW?
95 BAY WEST, 36C. The address was false, of course; one never knew when the law was listening in. The real address was in the code he’d been sent, next to a marker Phoenix would find later. YOU COMING?
MAYBE.
MAKE IT FAST. THIS ONE’S HOT.
THE CHIP OR THE GIRL?
YES.
Then the face was gone from his screen, and the words also, and in its place the slow and stately dance of the foreign virus had begun once more. He watched it for a minute and then muttered “Damn!” He knew he’d been hooked, and good. How like Nuke to give him barely enough data to draw him into something, too little for him to assess the possible risks—or rewards—without showing up himself. Damn it all, the guy lived halfway across the waystation. Why couldn’t they just ’net this stuff back and forth, like sane people?
With a sigh he saved all his work, picked up his backpack, and ordered his grayware to decode the directions he’d been sent. This had better be good.
It was three tubes, two flyways, and a damn long walk to where Nuke was holed up. Or a docking tram, if you had the money. That was the problem with ’netting for a living. You could be working with people halfway across the node for all you knew, which was fine until you had to have lunch with them or something ... then it was a bitch and a half. He started toward the tram and then his wellseeker kicked in, reminding him that he got so little exercise these days, and didn’t he think that once, just once, he could do the right thing for himself and walk a little? He could hardly object to its nagging, since he’d programmed it himself, and with a wry smile he set off on a hike along the periphery of Paradise. At least the guy was on the same station as Phoenix; give thanks for small blessings.
The address that had been sent to him was on the waystation proper, near the middle of one of the vast public malls that encased Paradise like a colorful candy shell. Whatever had come in on Docking Ring Green to find Nuke, it had traveled a long way since then. Phoenix took a crowded public tube to the proper level and then made his way through the familiar chaos of ten thousand locals and a hundred thousand tourists, all shopping at once. Anyone living on Paradise was used to such a press of crowds, and to the buzz of a station net overloaded with local traffic. He’d been down in the processor chamber once—strictly illegally, of
course—and knew from that experience just how much equipment had been dedicated to tourist services alone. Which was what kept Paradise afloat, of course, when several hundred rivals had sunk under their own weight. Paradise knew that data flow was the lifeblood of any station, and made sure that the riff-raff chatter of its million daily visitors didn’t jam the channels that were needed for legitimate business. Phoenix flashed an icon that would segue him to a private channel, and could almost feel the signal speed up as he did so. One nanosecond instead of two. Any hacker could sense it.
SO WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU? he sent.
There was a momentary delay—Nuke must have been working on something in his own head, usually he kept the com link open otherwise—and then the answer came. WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?
He looked around, at the stores surrounding him, the holo ads flickering brightly above, the distant flash of a directional sign. MATA HARI CONCOURSE, BY SOME BIG ARCADE.
THERE ARE FIVE ARCADES ON MATA HARI.
He muttered a picturesque curse under his breath and looked for a more helpful sign, trying to make out details among the hundred or so flashing advertisements that competed for attention in the airspace over the arcade. As he did, he heard someone inside the arcade suddenly squeal in delight, and a blast of holo rockets took off from the roof, blinding all who watched for several annoying seconds. BIG WINNER-BIG WINNER-BIG WINNER flashed overhead, drowning out everything else. Already the mall police were moving in to guard whomever it was that had hit whatever jackpot ... she’d have to pay them off later for their service, but that was only to be expected. You wouldn’t last five minutes in a mall like this, with that kind of cash in your account.